Taxonomy term

evolution

Before birds took to the air, a number of anatomical features evolved that allowed them to get off the ground. While many of these features were skeletal adaptations that have been well-documented in the fossil record, when exactly the large-volume lungs needed to power flight developed has long been a mystery. But the recent discovery of a unique fossil bearing a significant amount of preserved soft tissue, including lung tissue, has shed light on how early birds adapted to breathe in flight.

When an asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, it helped wipe out all the dinosaur lineages save one: the birds. But birds didn’t completely dodge the cataclysm the asteroid triggered. Recent research suggests that forests around the planet were devastated. With forests gone, bird species that called trees home went extinct alongside their nonavian dinosaur cousins. This means that the birds that we see living in trees today evolved from lineages that, in the aftermath of the impact, were ground-dwelling.

It takes a hardy plant to live on top of a mountain, but new research shows that summits in the Alps are hosting more species of plants than ever before. Long-term botany surveys conducted on 302 European mountaintops over the past 145 years show that the variety of plant species living on the harsh summits has markedly increased over the last 10 years due to climate change.

The first embers of life are thought to have emerged on Earth between 4.5 billion and 3.7 billion years ago, but how and where the initial sparks arose remains a mystery. Two leading theories suggest that the first self-replicating molecules — a necessity for life — may have gotten a start either in deep-ocean hydrothermal vents or in small warm ponds on land. In a new study, researchers suggest that the wet-dry cycles occurring in small, seasonal ponds would have made a better natural incubator.

In the Middle Devonian, roughly 385 million years ago, the first vertebrates began making their way out of water. For these pioneering fish, the adaptation of fins into limbs facilitated the transition. But in a new study, researchers have found that millions of years before fully functional terrestrial limbs evolved, some fish were developing better eyesight — an evolutionary adaptation they suggest gave an advantage to fish hunting insects near the shore.

Horses have changed size and shape dramatically over the last 20 million years, evolving from small dog-sized creatures with multiple toes into the large, hoofed grazing animals we see today. But the factors that drove these changes have been unclear. In a new study in Science, scientists tested the long-held theory that horses evolved rapidly to compete with one another during the worldwide expansion of grasslands starting 18 million years ago.

During the Ordovician Period, roughly 470 million years ago, an asteroid the size of a small moon collided with another rocky object in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, shattering the asteroid into billions of pieces. Fragments from the epic collision still occasionally fall to Earth today, making up a large share of the meteorites recovered. But in the immediate wake of the Ordovician event, many pieces rained down on the planet, settling on the surface and in layers of rock forming at the time. In a new study, researchers studying some of these meteorite-rich layers have refined the timescale for the collision. The results bring into question a proposed link between the meteorite bombardment and an evolutionary uptick known as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE).

You could have your mother to blame for a predisposition to baldness, but you might need to thank a Neanderthal for your ability to fight off disease. In the past decade, researchers have identified a number of genes in the human genome that they believe originated in Homo sapiens’ close evolutionary kin, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Now, a study published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution has identified additional traces of such archaic genes in modern human DNA.